February 28, 2005

The inexorable drumbeat of climate disaster stories goes on, but no one seems interested in checking the facts.

The most recent assault on common sense comes from Alaska. There, Republican senators Ted Stevens and Lisa Murkowski are now said to be favoring onerous climate change legislation sponsored by Arizona’s John McCain. McCain believes he can ride global warming all the way to the 2008 presidential nomination by grabbing the horde of green-leaning California and Pacific Coast delegates who will be off-limits to his southern competition, Bill Frist (Tennessee) and George Allen (Virginia), both of whom oppose McCain’s expensive, ineffective bill.

That’s right. McCain’s bill will do absolutely nothing measurable to curtail global warming for the foreseeable future. It’s nicknamed “Kyoto Lite” in Washington, because it is an imitation of the infamous Kyoto Protocol on global warming.

But Kyoto is itself useless. Even Al Gore’s scientists conceded that, over 50 years, with full participation by every nation involved, the change in global temperature Kyoto would cause would be a teeny thirteen-hundredths of a degree, an amount impossibly small to measure. Given that McCain’s staff surely knows that, the hidden agenda for his presidential strategy becomes obvious.(more…)

February 26, 2005

Pick up any newspaper or tune in to any news program and take a look at the weather report. Nine times out of 10, it’s all about some sort of calamitous weather event (heat wave, cold outbreak, strong winds, lack of precipitation, too much precipitation, no snow, avalanches, etc.). And more often than we would prefer, someone comments that “these are the types of things that we should expect more of because of an increasing greenhouse effect,” with the usual disclaimer “although no one can say for sure whether this one particular event was caused by global warming.”

The association between weather events and climate change is commonly made, despite the lack of evidence to support it. Increasingly, those scientists who don’t blindly rally for The Cause are being cast out of the “mainstream” by the self-appointed membership council.(more…)

February 10, 2005

The UK newspaper The Independent grows less and less credible as its tales of global warming doom and gloom grow ever more outrageous. We have a name for this genre—science fiction.

The UK newspaper The Independent is doing everything it can to proclaim itself the world’s leading newspaper of environmental doom and gloom. Here are a sampling of headlines from just the past two weeks alone: “Apocalypse Now: how mankind is sleepwalking to the end of the Earth,” “Greenhouse gas ‘threatens marine life,” “Dramatic change in West Antarctic ice could produce 16ft rise in sea levels,” “Coral reefs may start to dissolve in 30 years,” “Global warming is ‘twice as bad as thought,’” “Countdown to global catastrophe,” and “Global warming approaching point of no return, warns leading climate expert.” All these articles seize upon the most extreme and outrageous claims made by like-minded scientists and politicians whose goal it is to scare the world back into the Dark Ages.(more…)

February 7, 2005

In the face of evidence resulting from their own research, some scientists refuse to abandon their preconceived idea: that computer-based climate models reliably forecast future climate.

We’ve come across research published in the peer-reviewed journal Geophysical Research Letters, the title of which pushes the limits of scientific acceptability: “Forty-five years of observed moisture in the Ukraine: No summer desiccation (yet).” It appears we have now entered a phase of the global climate change debate wherein scientists begin to trumpet their personal bias even if it runs contrary to evidence compiled by the scientific entity they represent or, even more astounding, if it runs counter to research results they themselves produce!(more…)